Step 2: Where am I at the moment.

So. I need to know where I am now ... how far do I need to go to get where I want to be?

My daily schedule isn't actually too far out.

5am Rise

This varies between 4.30 and 5.30 and I never use an alarm clock. I have an hour to clear the overnights and set up for the day.

6am Start transition to Office.

Because I pick up kids from school, I need to get to the office early and get in as much time as I can before mid afternoon.

7am-2.45pm Office time.

Sometimes I take a lunch. Most days I just walk over to the student center and get something to take back to my desk. Lately my boss and I are trying to walk more at lunch by trekking to a local sandwich shop.

2.45-7.30pm Kid time. Dinner time. Karate classes.

My wife goes to work late so she can drop them off at school. I leave early to pick them up and fix dinner. The spousal unit, bless her gizzard, is not a cook. Luckily, I am, so I fix dinner. (Confession: we eat take out too much. I don't like it, but the logistics of making meals that the kids won't eat are killing me.) My girls study karate at the local dojo. Sometimes they don't like it, but I see how it's helping them and I make them go. What that means is 4 nights a week, I'm at the dojo with one or the other of them.

7.30-11pm My time.

I need to put in an hour on work stuff here to "make my eight" and wrap up whatever loose ends my brain can still process. I don't get too anal about it because I usually work 7 days a week. It's easier to stay in the zone than jump in and out of it. I'll spend several hours on the weekends thinking, planning, and -- lately -- mindmapping in between household chores and such.

I have a monthly subscription to the local video store and for a time, I was catching up on movies in this time slot. I also like to watch some anime here. While I don't necessarily enjoy all of it, there are some shows that have been fabulous and the cultural differences between US and Japan tweak my noggin.

11pm Bed Time.

I prefer to go to bed at 10 because 11-5 is only 6 hrs. Unfortunately, I more frequently push it to 12, leaving only 5 hrs sleep a night. It's been like that for years so I'm not sure how serious it is. Lately I find I need a bit more sleep than that. Over a week, the sleep deprivation builds up and I wind up being groggy at in-opportune times. I find myself napping in the car while waiting for the kids at karate, or nodding out in my chair in the evening.

The only way this really changes on the weekend is we don't have to deal with school or karate, and I don't go to the office. My work is largely in my head and I have almost as good a connection in my house as in my office. The only real difference is the uplink speed is a bit faster at the office. My set-up is such that I always have all my tools at hand at all times. I like it that way because it means I can take advantage of various inspirations whether or not I'm "at work."

The reality is that I'm always at work, even when I'm chaperoning the kids scootering in the park. I don't carry a computer, but I do carry a cell phone and mp3 player.

My 7 year old asked my wife if I were depressed because I never leave my desk.

Interesting question.

Step 1: Imagine It

The first step toward the future you want is imagining what it might be. Somebody said that. I'm not sure who but it seems like a good start.

So, what would a 'day in the life' be like if it were the perfect day?

5am: wake on my own. no alarm clock. I do this now so we're already on the path. Grab a cuppa from the fresh pot on the sideboard and head to my work station. I sip my coffee and contemplate the view from my various windows. Ocean? Mountains? Ocean, I think, but anything with a vista will do. Right now I spend my life in cellars. Spend an hour or so clearing the overnight correspondence.

6am: morning walk -- half an hour -- contemplation time.

7am: breakfast

8-12: writing
12-1: lunch on the veranda
1-2: nap
2-5: students and clients
5-7: dinner
7-10: r&d
10: bed.

Repeat.

Of course this gets interrupted with kids, spouse, yardwork, and car repairs, but as a "Daily Default" it feels pretty attractive.

One every three months I want to go somewhere. Convention, visit a friend in another part of the world, take a week off to go fishing. I don't know. The what is an 'ad hoc' but the DOING is the thing.

Normally I'd say this looked pretty boring but my "cognitive life" is massively consuming these days. I can't stop thinking about -- puzzling over -- pondering various things. How to get Education in the US back on track? How to get paid for doing good work? What is the fundamental shift in society going to do to the nature of work and career paths? Little stuff like that.

This notion isn't fleshed out enough. I haven't finished imagining but I need to publish this so I can see what it looks like. :D

A Year Ago

I'm a couple days late getting this post out. I've had a head cold in my brain and it's made me kinda squishy between the ears.

A year ago Monday, I got the call that my dad had died in the night. I was expecting the call and I wrote about it last April. There's nothing like being 50-something and having your mortality waved in your face like that. I expected that it would be a kind of wake up call for me.

I'm not sure that it was, because looking back over my first year as an orphan I don't know that I've really done anything better than I've always done. Heck, I'm not sure I've even done anything differently -- better or worse. I'm pretty sure it's not because I'm completely satisfied with the way I live my life.

And I know it's not because I'm a peace with the world. The closer I get to the end of my time on it, the more angry and frustrated I get with it.

Start with the little things like finding/making/carving out the time I need to write/think. Or take my daily walks - which I miss dreadfully but which are pushed back so I have more time to do -- what? Read blogs? Discard email spam? Patch computer programs? Fix stuff? Break stuff?

Heck, I haven't watched a movie in a month or more! Last thing I saw was an episode of Battlestar Galactica from season one.

Move outward to the kids and their school which aggravates me beyond almost all bearing because of the insistance on protecting kids from learning while penalizing schools and teachers for failing to perform. Which reminds me of the Ninny-in-Chief which just infuriates me more. School policy aside, how can he SERIOUSLY be thinking of nuking Iran??

But I digress.

Too much doing. Too little thinking.

Too many messages. Not enough comprehension.

Stephen Downes has retired to an island to think.

Will Richardson has gone over to the dark side.

People all around are echoing my "wtf!?" on a variety of fronts.

I've 20 years left. Maybe.

I need to think how best to use them.

Crash

Ok. I don't usually get into the whole Oscar's thing. I keep track of best picture because usually it's something I've not seen and I try to catch up when it comes out on DVD later. This year I'm ahead of the game.

I saw "Crash" a couple weeks ago. I won't spoil it for you by giving away any plot details, but this is a movie about stuff that almost happens -- a kind of a cross between "there but for the grace of God" and "somebody's watching over me" meme. It was kinda interesting for the interlocking plot twists, but I saw that gimmick on CSI a long time ago. By and large I pulled it out of the dvd player with an "oh hum."

The reason I bring it up is that there's another movie with the same name that has a heck of a lot better plot and character development. It's also got a lot more sex and violence so I'm not sure what that says about me. It's not a movie you'll want to show in Driver's Ed class -- or any class for that matter, unless it might be a Graduate Seminar in Abnormal Psych. These people are sick ... but the movie itself is fascinating for what it says about America's automobile based culture. If you have to choose between the two crashes -- and you don't have to worry about kids seeing it -- I'd recommend the older one.

But that's just me.

I Passed 8th Grade Math

I don't know if I should be proud or not ...

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Life's Proportions

I just noticed that my life has taken on a new proportion.

Do other people measure their lives in proportion? Like, when I turned 34, I noted the change when I'd lived more than half my life on my own...having left my parents' house at 17 to join the service and never going back. Last year marked the point when I'd spent half my life with my spouse.

In '87 I moved inland. Up to that point, I'd spent my entire life - 35 years' worth - within the smell of the sea. I spent summers as a boy in the tide pools along the coast of Maine. I remember visiting the "ocean" branch of the family -- the Gilliams, and Wallaces, and Pyes -- those who actually made their living from the sea -- and wondering how my branch could have given up the ocean and gone to farming, and eventually the factories.

I'm not that far removed, truth told. My grandfather Wallace was a lobsterman in his early years altho took up the new fangled Electronics trade in the 40s. My grandfather Lowell, and his father before him, however, were landsmen -- farmers who raised cows and planted potatoes and corn. My father left the farm in favor of the factory where he was able to provide well enough for us growing up -- although we did keep a large garden which kept us fed through the leaner times.

But growing up in rural Maine, the ocean was just "over there." And not just any ocean, but the North Atlantic. When you go to the beach -- Popham, Pemaquid, Old Orchard -- you're not talking about any enclosed area of water but the North Freaking Atlantic. Standing there and looking east, you're looking at Europe with nothing in between.

My whole personal identity, my self image from boyhood, was Downeaster. None of these prissy Boston Lowells, but a by-God Mainer -- and a Mariner once removed. I even paid my dues upon the briney -- first as a dragger boy, and later aboard a Coast Guard Cutter in that same North Atlantic. The saltwater in my veins carries the distinctive flavor of the cold, and rockweed, and clam flats. When it's silent, in those rare moments when I can hear my own body, I hear the sounds of the ocean I grew up with and the sussurus of the winds in the pines along the rocky headlands.

But I just realized, my proportion has shifted. A third of my life, I've been inland now.

Not that there's anything wrong with being inland. The Great Plains are amazing and the Rockies have an almost cliched majesty. From where I'm sitting now, I can walk to where the Oregon Trail once passed - altho in honesty it would probably take me a week! Cowboys once lived in my neighborhood and coyotes still howl in the night. For a Yankee, a Downeaster, this is pretty nifty stuff.

But, it's not me.

I miss the smell of the ocean -- the clean iodine smell of the rock and sand, the pungent soup of brine and mud and reeds, even the diesel fumes and bilgewater reek when the fishing fleet gets underway in the morning. I'm feeling neither "fish nor fowl" as we used to say -- not part of this Western culture, nor any longer part of the heritage passed down from father and grandfather and before. I sang sea chanties to my kids when I bathed them as babies, but they're just funny songs to them. They don't mean the same as they do to me -- they're not the link to the past, not an anchor for identity with the rode trailing into the past.

And because I see they cannot share the link -- have not the stuff with which to knit identity that includes more than a minimum of what I can pass on to them -- I begin to doubt my own identity as well. My anchor in the past has started to drag on a sandy bottom and I find myself wondering who I really am.

The proportion can still be said, "I lived most of my life within the smell of the sea." But that proportion is shifting -- and the more it shifts, the less I am who I was.

I wonder who I'll be.

An Odd Day

As I left the video store today and crossed the parking lot, a woman crossed in front of me. I'd seen her in the grocery moments before -- so striking that she stood out in the sea of faces. Dark haired, well dressed, late 50s maybe -- devastatingly attractive. As I unlocked my car, she looked up and saw me looking.

Deer in headlights.

I wanted to buy her a cup of coffee and talk. So badly I shook. The conversation spooled in my head between two heartbeats like some movie loop where the guy gets into the elevator with the girl and has this great experience only to return to real beginning -- stepping into the elevator and not speaking.

Lump-Dump.

"Um! Hi! Can I buy you a cuppa coffee?"

"Do I know you?"

"Well, no. But I saw you in the grocery store a few minutes ago and here you are and ... well. I thought I'd like to buy you a cup of coffee. Maybe you could tell me about yourself."

"What do you want?"

"I just want to buy you a cup of coffee and talk with a fascinating stranger for 20 minutes and pretend that I'm not a 50-something, paunchy, balding father of two with a mortgage, a car payment, and bad skin. I just want to step away from the ongoing drama that is my life and see if there's something else out there that doesn't involve lawn care, house paint, and worn carpets. I thought -- perhaps -- you might spare 20 minutes to tell me about your life and then walk away and never see me again. And then I can go home and unpack the groceries, assure my very insecure spouse that I love her, and perhaps, have a fresh outlook on what passes for reality."

"You don't want much."

"Actually, I think I do. And I'm wondering if it's too much."

Lump-dump.

And the movie keeps rolling.

She walks by and I don't speak. I get into my car and drive home thinking I'm some kind of idiot for (a) wanting to speak (b) failing to have the courage (c) betraying, somehow, somebody ... Knowing how stupid it is -- how much being approached by a strange man in the parking lot might have frightened her.

And I get here thinking I'll write up a nice little post -- first of the new year -- and I find a comment from the woman I thought I should have married but who had the sense to follow her own path.

Yep.

An odd day all around.

Year End Reflections

One of the problems with the end of the year is that it forms a natural inflection point. The problem is that once I start reflecting, I can get lost and start reflecting on unexpected things.

I don't so much think of whole situations. It's more like I flash on instants that carry a temporal echo. They're not necessarily in any chronological sequence, and even if I thought they were, my perceptions have to be suspect.

... sitting in the sand outside our first house on Little Sebago Lake in Windham, Maine. I couldn't have been more than four because we moved from that house when I was ready to start school. The sun was summer warm and I remember the smell of pine and stale tobacco. Dad had given up smoking his pipe by then and the pipe rack was a favored toy. I remember the chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee always having something to say ...

... riding my bicycle around and around the house on Dutton Hill. Flying with my sibs in a pack, racing on the wet grass. Heavy, old, clumsy, rattle-traps of bicycles ...

... crystal cold day. laying on my back on the frozen crust of snow at the top of the hill. eyes dazzled by the brilliant blue of the sun glinting off the ice crystals. letting gravity pull my body down the hill, sliding. whoosh of jacket against the crust, sky flashing over head...

... amazing hubbub from the family gathered in the house. "kids table" set in the next room because there just weren't enough chairs for us all to sit together. cousins and others mixing in uneasy, unfamiliarity at first ... slowly remembering that we really like each other...

... smell of the pine forest. babble of the brook. trout in the stream but I leave them ...

... working the winches aboard the Minkette out of Portland. Haul-back with half a bag of whiting that I know will take two hours to sort ... easing up on the power and guiding the cable onto the spool so it doesn't bind ... lifting the bag over the side and spilling an avalanche of silver across the deck ...

... warm day on the Hazel A, tuna fishing off Monhegan. Gaze across the water, the engines a distance rumble under my feet and the tower sways two meters left and right ... I've been here all day in the sun and my face is burned, my lips are tight but I spot the wake before the seasoned adults ... cousin Herbert up in the pulpit with his harpoon ready ... but the fish subside before we get close enough ...

... broiling in the sun, weeding carrots on a 100 foot row. 9 in the morning. soil already hot enough to burn my hands so I scuffle them along in the dirt to keep them off the surface. I'm not sure .. is this a carrot? is that a weed? twenty minutes for the first 10 feet...

... winter tobogganing down the Big Hill. Screaming down the soft snow only to crash into the stone wall just before the road. No wind. Can't breathe. Shock and snow and blood...

... horse dung and ammonia, mucking the stalls ... hating the job but loving the beasts ... hot summer stench and cold winter warmth ... molasses rich grain, sweet alfafa hay, arms breaking from the buckets of fresh, cold water ...

... night at sea watching the running lights of the factory ships around us ...

... night in New York City ... thinking of the millions of people around me, marveling that so many people live in such a small area after growing up where 100 people was a crowd ... all the lights like jewels ...

... frozen winter sky, telescope finding faint nebulae ... the sky suddenly awash from horizon to horizon in shimmering borealis ...

... leaving to go to boot camp

... leaving to go to Governor's Island

... leaving to go to Kodiak

... leaving to get married

... leaving to get divorced

... leaving to take my wife to the hospital because today's the day my second child will be born.

... standing on the deck of a ferry in Casco Bay listening to Schooner Faire playing on the speakers as we come around Portland Head and knowing that it's probably the last time I'll be "coming home" that way ... leaving for Buffalo in the morning.

... scraping the frost from the inside of my bedroom window so I can look up to see Orion's belt above the trees and wondering what I'll be when I grow up ...

... clam flats in summer.

... squeaky snow in winter.

... the icy run off down the dirt driveway in spring, puddles iced over in the morning from our dam building activity of the afternoon before.

... shockingly deep blue autumn skies alive with the colors of sumac, oak, and maple.

... the smell of wood smoke, perking coffee, and frying bacon on the woodstove. Electricity costs more than wood ... and wood warms twice ... once when you chop it and once when you burn it ...

This is will be my first New Year as an orphan.

Somehow, it's ok.

Political testing

You are a Social Liberal (86% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (23% permissive) You are best described as a: Strong Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Thanks Leslie!

Tempus Fugits All Over!

Jeez. I can't believe it's been a month since I posted .. My class over at Phaedrus Academy has just siphoned off all my excess bloggy goodness - not that I had a lot going in.

But I STILL have all the EVO2005 group in my aggregator and I'm still reading.

I used James Farmer's Edublogs.org for the students. It's worked well because they're all WordPress blogs and very smooth. The "theme menu" is nice .. they can pick a good looking theme and not worry about hacking the style sheets together. It loses a little bit from not being able to customize the template, I think, but the upside is that all they have to master is reading, writing, commenting, and aggregating while they're working on the basics of distance education.

And they're OFF!!

This morning marked the kickoff of my course on Teaching Online.

The students have been "muttering in the halls" for the last few days -- I sent out a warm up message to the list server mid-week last week in response to the 8th "how does this work" email. So some of them are ahead of the curve and some, unfortunately, still haven't registered.

Anybody in the webheads group who wants to get on board (you can audit for free, but if you want the college credit you have to pay) is welcome to.

The blog is at http://nclid.unco.edu/campus/phaedrus

The moodle is at http://nclid.unco.edu/campus

The course is Phaedrus Academy ... :D

Phaedrus Academy

On Monday I start teaching a course to teach classroom teachers how to teach online. The course is, of course, offered online. It's called Phaedrus Academy in honor of a student of Socrates who had a lot to say about the introduction of a new technology -- writing -- into academe. Socrates was rather upset at this innovation, fearing that it would mark the end of Education as each man no longer would rely on the command of his memory and oratory. It was, of course, the first distance delivery technology and so seemed fitting for our course.

This will be the fourth iteration of the offering and the first one that I've been able to use Moodle for. This is a big thing for me because the major work of the class is to coach classroom teachers in the process of design and implementation of an online course. We use that idea as an anchoring construct to give students a structure -- a foundation -- to which they can build their knowledge of tools, skills, and practice. In the past, we've only been able to talk about what we might do. This time, with a fully functional templated structure, we can actually have them design and build it. Time limits will prevent actually running the course, but we're one step closer to an authentic experience.

With only a few days left, though, I'm struggling with where to write for the class. Should I have a separate blog for my course writings -- separate from my meta-writings about the course? Should I have one blog for all my course writings? Including the meta-analysis of the course as it occurs? Should I incorporate it into an existing blog? Perhaps with a set of categories?

I need to make up my mind pretty quickly ...

Postcard from 12005'

This week we took a little overnight trip to the other side of the mountains. Our path took us through the Rocky Mountain National Park - along Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuously paved road in the US. Along the way we stopped and hiked up the 200' from the Alpine Visitor's Center to this marker.

I took almost 100 frames and I'll be loading more of them to my flickr account over the next 24 hours or so. I need to get them loaded before I forget what they are.

Postcard from Florida

Last weekend I was in Florida at a conference. We stayed at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort. It's quite a place. Late July, however, is a darn poor time to be in Central Florida.

Call me naive ...

... but when did it become alright for teachers to lie to kids?

When politics and education intersect, we have some interesting issues arise.

I'm reading this (PDF, sorry) report on the abstinence-is-the-one-true-path sex education curricula. Now I appreciate we often gloss over details - we simplify for clarity. We have Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. But are these the same as deliberately promoting false/dangerous information in order to put forward a religious agenda? And why are MY tax dollars supporting this crap?

Yes, I'm overstating the case a bit. All these programs promote abstinence and if the students follow the advice, they'll be safe. But if they stray, they could die from a lack of knowledge and an abundance of mis-information.

These programs downplay the importance and effectiveness of safe-sex. "It's not all that safe" leads, inevitably, to "why bother if it's not going to work anyway." I saw a clip from 60 Minutes wherein the medical expert pointed out that all benefit from the abstinence programs evaporates on the first exposure to reality, since the students who've been fed this cark have no basis upon which to make any kind of reasonable decisions.

The logical line here seems to be "If we keep them stupid, we can keep them scared. If we can keep them scared, we can convince them that only marriage can keep them safe. And of course, once they're married, they'll breed like rabbits ..."

It's ok to kill them for not believing? When did *that* become a "Family Value"...?

Ok. So .. It's all a numbers game, right? ONLY about 1/3 of 1% of the people in the US carry HIV. That's only slightly more than people who are blind. What're the chances that you'd pick one of them? And as far as pregnancy goes, well, that's only gonna mess up the girls ... So, the Holy Fathers here seem to think that's ok. Everything else we can cure with a pill, or a shot, right?

Does this seem troubling to anybody else? As a father of two rather high-spirited pre-teens, I gotta say, this has me seeing red.

MIT Blog Survey

Nerdy Goodness!

Frankly, I didn't think I was THIS nerdy.

Thanks to Remote Access for the quiz link.

Learner Centered

One of the things I'm wrestling with around the web these days is what is a "Learner Centered Environment." I wanted to bring that discussion over here with my EVO buddies and see what this looks like to you.

The problem I have is this notion that learners in a learner centered environment have to "come to class on time." Now this is a metaphor for all the stuff we make students do -- come to class, do homework assignments, study in a particular sequence, attend school at a particular place and time, etc. How is this learner centered?

There are several decentralized models lurking about -- I've been inspired by Scott Wilson's vision (corrected) for some time. But I think it's too complicated -- too specific.

So I made this diagram:





But is this too simplistic?

Cultural Creative

I got this from Bee. What is it about these quizzes?

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. Cultural Creative 94% Postmodernist 88% Existentialist 75% Idealist 69% Materialist 63% Modernist 50% Romanticist 25% Fundamentalist 0% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Tempus Fugit

I am still trying to come up to speed from my hiatus in Maine.

It's difficult because I'm not sure where each day goes. I get up in the morning, go thru the day, and get to nighttime without being really aware of what has happened. I attend meetings and fiddle with code. I put other people's work online and graze mindlessly through blog after blog. I'm not writing here at all and only sporadically on my other blog.

There was a really cool conference last weekend just minutes from my house. I wanted to attend but stayed home and celebrated my daughter's 10th birthday. In a couple of weeks I may be going back on the road to help another school transition to online delivery. I still haven't heard back from my job interview from last month.

Is this Spring Fever? I just can't get engaged ...

My wife is convinced that I've dropped into depression far enough that I'm not aware of it.

Hm.